But the merry-go-round is not confined to Google Analytics or even website statistics. Any kind of statistics will do.

It is a miracle I manage to do any work. One of the most seductive things about the constant dashboard merry-go-round is that it feels like work. There you are frantically pounding away quickly moving between your various dashboards. It even looks to everybody else like work. Your boss probably thinks you’re being really productive.

The problem is that there is no action. There is no end result.

You log into Google Analytics, go to the “Real-Time” section, you discover that there are five people browsing your site. On pages X, Y, and Z.

So what. You are not getting any actionable information from this.

You then go to the other three sites you’ve got in Google Analytics. Rince and reapeat.

Solutions

The obvious solution is to just stop. But if it was as simple as that, you’d already have stopped and so would I.

Notifications

One of the things you are trying to do by going into your dashboards is to see what’s changed. Has anything interesting happened? One way you can short circuit this is to configure the dashboard to tell you when something interesting has happened.

I use the Pingdom service to monitor company websites and I almost never go into the Pingdom dashboard. Why? Because I’ve configured the service to send me a text message to my mobile whenever a website goes down. If I don’t receive a text, then there’s no need to look at the dashboard.

Notifications do come with a pretty big caveat: you must trust your notifications. If I can’t rely on Pingdom to tell me when my sites are down, I may be tempted to go dashboard hunting.

Even if your systems are only capable of sending email alerts, you can still turn those into mobile friendly notifications and even phone call alerts using services like PagerDuty, OpsGenie and Victorops.

Instead of needing a mobile phone app for each service you run, you can merge all of your alerts into a single app with mobile notifications.

If you haven’t received a notification, then you don’t need to go anywhere near the dashboard. Every time you think about going there just remind yourself that, if there was a problem, you’d already know about it.

Time Management Techniques

None of the time management techniques will of themselves cure your statsitus, it just moves it into your own “pomodori“, or, the time in between your productive tasks. If you want to sacrifice your own leisure time to stats, then go nuts. But at least you’re getting work done in the mean time.

The Writers’ Den

One technique writers use to be more productive is the writer’s den. The idea is you set aside a space with as few distractions as possible, including a PC with just the software you need to work and that isn’t connected to the internet.

Not a bad idea, but unfortunately, a lot of us can’t simply switch the internet off. We either work directly with internet connected applications or we need to use reference materials only available on the web.

The drawback with systems that restrict access is that, as you are likely to be the person setting up the system, you’re also likely to be able to circumvent it quite easily too.

Conclusion

For me, dashboards and stats can be both a boon and a curse at the same time. They can hint at problems and actions you need to take, but they can also suck an awful lot of time out of your day.

I’ve found that a combination of time management and really good notifications are a great way to stop the dashboard merry-go-round and put stats into their rightful place. A tool to help you improve, not an end in themselves.

The problem with concentrating too much on statistics is that it is so seductive. It feels like you are working hard but, in the end, if there are no actions coming out of the constant stats watching, then it is all wasted effort.

If you have any hints and tips how you overcame your dashboard merry-go-round, please leave a comment. 🙂

Author: Jack Hughes

An experienced software engineer with 20+ years experience writing products for Microsoft Windows based operating systems as well as 12+ years experience hosting websites on Linux and Windows including e-commerce and CMS systems.
View all posts by Jack Hughes